getting feedback on final film and making changes

We all presented our near finished films to the class for some critique. This was very useful especially since we'd been staring at the same thing for so long it's easy to miss little or even large mistakes. A few points on my animation were made which I was able to rectify relatively quickly. First was the throwing motion lacked weight which didn't make it look believable by speeding up the end of the movement I was able to make it look better. There were a few stray bits of colour or sections where the background showed through in a few frames so all I needed to do was touch up those frame. The motion at the end with the final monster took too long for his jaw to close so I elongated the start of the scene and removed frames of its open mouth. I was also told that the font at the end was not fitting for the animation. At the time I thought it was the right decision but looking back it was a poor choice highlighting the importance of 3rd person critique. All that was left to do after that was correct and add the sounds as there were a few missing sound effects and lots of the sound was far too quite.

Adding sound

My animation for the previous project did not feature any sound so creating a soundtrack was a completely new experience for me and I found it a lot harder than I thought I would. Since I decided I didn't want to use music I just used nature sounds and character "dialog" for my animation. Testing/listening to different soundtracks took a while as there are a lot variations that didn't fit. Timing sound correctly was also difficult as I could only move the clips by 1 frame jumps. I was able to fix this by cutting subclips in premiere. overall I'm quite happy with the sound I did all the recorded bits on my laptop but in future I will definitely use the sound booth as the quality is a lot better.

starting to put footage together

I started to put together finished footage to see how all of it runs together. I was happy with how its starting to look however its clear that all the scenes are essential for this animation to make sure its the viewer understands the story.

inspiration and influence

Kristyna Baczynski is an independent illustrator who's work I recently became a fan of because of her really interesting and unique style. It was one of her comics in particular that only used one colour for shading that i thought was incredible effective yet simplistic which seemed like a brilliant combo for animation. I took influence from a few other comic book artists as I have quite a few lying around my room which i like to frequently flick through. I feel this helps shape and improve the style I'm using/creating.

panning with after effects

I had to pan out a shot which I'd never done before but it turned out to be a relatively simple process using after effects. I just made sure all the photoshop layers were linked together and added a scale/position transformation to them which slowly pans out. It was very simple but I was very pleased with the result

walk cycle

Doing the walk cycle was a large pain during this project and although I'm happy with the final result there were a lot of mistakes made before I got there. The benefit of doing this digitally was that it was easy to rectify all mistakes I made relatively quickly. The main issue I had with it was foot placement during the walk cycle. I felt to move the body effectively I had to slide the feet forward but when playing it back the body actually moved far too quickly and the  "slippery" feet looked very odd. I moved each of the frames into the correct place so the feet would not move and it looked a lot better and I should fortunately not encounter this problem again when doing another walk cycle.

linking layers in after effects.

Using what I learnt in the aftereffects tutorial we had the other day I was able to put tother separated animation of different photoshop layers and run them together. In this scene a mud monster lands on the boys shoulder originally I just had him blinking his eyes but it look far too static and there was no weight to the monster. I decided to have the head and shoulder move to rectify this problem. The problem with moving the head was the animation for the eyes blinking was done using separate layer for each of the frames, moving the head would leave the eyes behind. By parenting the eye layers to the head layer it meant they would move at the same rate as the head so they'd always stay in the correct place.

After effects tutorial.

 

This was the final outcome from my last after effects tutorial. I missed the session previous to this one however I'd used after effects a bit before hand so I was able to catch up. This session really opened my eyes to how powerful an animation tool after effects could be. Its most definitely something I plan to use for my next project. In this session we looked at moving different photoshop layers in relation to each other to create an animation. At the end of the session we looked at using expressions in after effects. This is an incredibly useful function which allows the using to command certain layer to perform certain tasks. We used one that looped key frames for the rest of the animation so they would not have to be repeated. You can also link motions or transformations of different layers together using the expressions function so one change in a layer changes another layer equally.

progress

I first started with the simplest scene of the animation since I'm still getting used to the software it would be better to start with less challenging animation. I made the faces of different layers to the eyes which allowed me to use aftereffects to create a motion tween. This method was a lot quicker than drawing every individual frame for the eye movement.

Flash

Today we started to learn the basics of flash. We learnt how to create simple shapes but the main function we looked at were motion tweens. We were able to set where objects move in the software and and what speeds they move at. We looked at accelerating and decelerating the motions as well using graphs. This was a useful session as it was the first time Id used flash before so I learnt a lot.

Hanna-Barbera (1960 onwards) Flintstones

The Flintstones was a 60's television cartoon that features the everyday lives of a family during the stone age. This television programme was one of the pinnacle during the TV age of animation. It was the most financially successful animated show for three decade until the creation of the Simpsons in the 90's. The show success is said to down to its simple juxtaposition of people carry out everyday tasks during the modernising 60's in a stone age setting. This creates a humorous but relatable plot that could be enjoyed by the whole family. Its relatability of the programme which I think made it so successful.

Disney: Education for Death: the Raising of a Nazi

This is a propaganda video created by disney. Its animated in the classic disney style which is normally associated with children's animated films. Walt Disney was commissioned by the US government during world war two to create propaganda and instructional films to help with the war effort. This film is very interesting because it showed that this style of animation could be used in a more serious sense and that the government clear at the time thought this medium of film would be a goo to choice to spread there message to the public.

Disney: The Skeleton Dance (1929)

The skeleton dance is a very early hand drawn disney short film. It is said to be the first ever music video. It feature choreographed dances, and graveyard alternatives to orchestral instruments replicating sound from the original score. Its can be called the first "music video" its the first animation to have the soundtrack as preproduction rather than post this means the animation was created for the musical score instead of working the other way round. I found this very interesting because nothing like this was made for quite a while after this but music videos for a few decades have seemed almost obligatory for popular musicians.

Windsor McCay: Gertie the Dinosaur

The film is one of the first animated short films to be created. It was used as an interactive part of a live show. I found this animation really interesting because it was the first to use techniques such as key framing, tracing paper and animation loops. It was because it was using better effective techniques like this it inspired the next wave of animators including walt disney which would help kick start the golden age of animation.

Ray Harryhausen: Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Ray Harryhausen was a stop motion visual effects artist who worked on many visual epics. Jason and the argonauts is a greek mythological story involving a greek hero going on a grand quest who has to face many great monsters. Computer animation did not exist when this film was made so the large monsters were created using stop motion, Ray Harryhausen was regarded as a master of this art. I found the visual effects in this film really interesting because they add a style to the film you can't replicate using computer animation.

Steven Lisberger: Tron (1982)

Tron at the time one probably the most technologically advanced films to have been produced and paved the way for computer animation in film. The film was inspired when Steven Lisberger, saw footage from the video game pong and thought computer generated video could be used for film. Tron was the first film to extensively use computer animated footage within and is regarded as a milestone for that. Most of the animation used was for backgrounds and objects such as the light cycles (image below). The computer used at the time had a max of 2mb of memory so there were serious limitation to what the animators could do. In many circumstances they'd just fade out to black to create a depth to the animation without having to use too much memory.

Katsuhiro Otomo: Akira (1988)

Akira is a cyberpunk/sci-fi anime from the late 80's and I consider it as one of the best animes of all time. The film is set in a futuristic post apocalyptic Tokyo which is rife with biker gangs and failing/corrupt government. Its a hand drawn animation and has some spectacular design. Akira is said to be a landmark point in japanese animation and cited to inspire/influence the design of many animations following it. The writing of Akira is also incredible it's based on mangas (japanese comics) the plot is very elaborated and there are lots of subtle undertones through out the film, it requires a few watch throughs to fully understand what happens in it.

persepolis (2007)

Perspolis is a French-Iranian animation and is one of the most emotive animations I've seen. It is a direct adaptation of a graphic novel. I feel it was an important animation because of the topics it touches on. Animation can easily been seen as a branch of entertainment branded for children but the subject matter of Persepolis is far from that. It details one girls childhood and growth into adulthood through the iranian civil war detailing the horrors it imposes on someones life. The style of Persepolis is excellent as well since it is taken from a graphic novel rather than being an interpretation of a book, this brings a slightly different feel to the film than other animations as the original layout is based from a comic.

The Flipbook or "Kinograph"

Pierre-Hubert Desvignes is credited with inventing the flip in 1868 however john Barnes Linnet of London was the first to patent the flibook. A flipbook is made of a set of images on separate pages bound together on one side like a book. The viewer flicks between the images in the book using there fingers and it creates a moving image. The flipbook is relatively simplistic compared to other devices around this earlier period of animation which made it more accessible to the public. I think the flipbook is incredibly important because to me it feel like the closest of the early animation techniques to hand drawn animation that around in the early 20th century.

The Phenakistoscope

The Phenakistoscope was invented in 1831 by Joseph Plateau from Belgium and Simon von Stampfer from Austria. The Phenakistoscope was made up of multiple images around a disc which is then spun around on a stick. The disc is placed in front of a mirror and there are evenly spaced out slits in the disc, these allow the viewer see a reflected images through the slits as an animation. When animation was in such an early stage it was only a privilege for the wealthy and power to view as these where not commonly available. I found the phenakistoscope really interesting mainly because it reminded me of the commonly found gif image that the internet is rife with these days however these were produced nearly 200 years ago.

Using illustrator

Near the tart of my production process I realised problems doing my line work in photoshop. A lot of the lines were coming out wavy and very inconsistent and this made the animation look very rudimentary. I decided to use Adobe illustrator for my line work, since its vector based it didn't matter what size I did the lines in for characters they always had a good resolution in the animation. It took me a while to get used to using illustrator but after fiddling around with tools I figured out how to use it. I first did all the rough's in photoshop to figure out movement paths, I then placed the images into illustrator and traced them. I then put them back into photoshop to paint them and then put them into the image sequence.

making a dog pant referencing

For one of the clips I needed to make a dog pant. I'd never done this before so I used a few references.

Dogs normally pant with little mouth movement as the tongue just moves, however when I animated it like that it looked very odd. I had to apply the exaggeration principle to this movement and make the mouth move as well to create a believable motion. i felt the dog from Pixar's "up" was a good example of an animated dog Pant. 

This is my final clip which will be in the animation.

Finished backgrounds.

These are my finished backgrounds ready for the animation. I made sure when making the background they were all created in 16:9 so they fit the screen perfectly and don't have to be readjusted. I really enjoy creating backgrounds and I feel they're very important. They help tell the story of the animation and set the style/tone as well.

Presenting my pre production work and getting feedback

We all had to present our ideas to small groups discussing what we wanted to do. I found this quite helpful the whole group gave insight into what I was doing right and what could have been done better. The main feedback I got was about the animations sound as I was unsure of what to use for my animation. Most of the feedback was positive about the project the style of it was very well received however the animatic came across as a little jumpy creating a little confusion with the animations narrative so this is a problem I need to address

animatic redo

After talking and reviewing my animatic it was made clear to me it was far too jumpy and there were too many shot crammed into a short time period. I was happy with most of the shots I had chosen and felt they all helped tell the animation's story however I managed to remove or combine a few to make it run much smoother.